As we get to the end of the year, people start looking to the future. Google has done the same and what they say can have a huge impact on your business.

Knowing the directions Google is going in earlier rather than later will allow you to be pro-active and have to plan for the changing future of search engine marketing; something that will put you far ahead of your competitors because while they’re trying to figure out what’s happening you’ll already be taking their customers away!

Whether you like it or not, Google is such a huge and critical part of the Web. They have control over virtually everyone’s online business and Web site.

They’ve been releasing, both officially and unofficially, their plans and “predictions” for 2010 and you need to pay attention.

Here’s what they’ve said…

Google will continue to expand in many directions as once.

Search More Types of Information

Look for them to be searching new types of data (you’ve seen that in the past with them searching Gmail, books, patents, and the beginnings of searching images and video).

They are forever on the lookout to search more types and if you have taken advantage of those and your competitors haven’t you’ll get a ranking boost that they won’t

Better Understanding of Content

Google has been adding to its understanding of content (and search queries) over the years (think spelling, synonyms, etc.) but they will be doing that by having more semantic understanding of the content, that is, better understand what the words actually mean in context rather than as just individual words looked at separately.

What this means is that it will be harder to scam Google with content that is created just to get high search results and, also, that Google will do a better job of providing search results (so your AdWords and AdSense ads will be better targeted).

I, and others, have been saying for a long time that the best thing is to have real content and that will become even more true as Google becomes “smarter” at reading Web pages and queries.

It will also allow Google to be able to handle “harder” more complex queries, ones they can’t accurately handle now.

Make sure you are the one providing lots of real, great content and let your competitors waste their time trying to game the system.

Getting Better Data

Just a look at Google’s “Squared” project will show you that they are very serious about being able to get “good data” from the Web.

For example, Google Squared, takes some category and creates a “square” of information based on it, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the Web.

So then search will provide faster and better results.

They are still working on it but it’s sort of fun and interesting to build “squares” and you can come across some things you hadn’t thought of or that spark good ideas.

A Faster Web

I previously mentioned that Google was looking to use load speed of a Web page as part of their search results.

Expect that to happen in 2010.

Google big shots, including Larry Page, want a faster Web and they are in a position to give a lot of positive and negative reinforcement to achieve that.

Basically, if your page loads slowly, or eventually more slowly than it should, then you won’t the get “ranking points” that your competitor whose page load like lightning will.

This is a big problem in Internet Marketing because the quality of the code of more sales and squeeze pages is truly hideous.

I’ve take PLR sales pages and changed the load time from 30 seconds to 2 seconds (and the perceived time difference to be even faster) just by “fixing” the underlying code.

Sure it may be easy to create in FrontPage or NVU or whatever and I understand the importance of getting something done and not creating an elegantly coded Web page but the quality of the pages are very bad and Google will start punishing you for it by poorer search results positioning that you would get if that page loaded quickly.

Google has created a number of tools to help you do this, you can find them at their Speed Site, there are articles, tools and a forum.

These tools will analyze your page telling you areas of slowness and they even have some tools to help you make your pages faster like creating properly compressed and optimized graphic images and shrinking down your JavaScript code.

Here is a quick video to show you one of their tools in use:

They also are providing some optimized JavaScript code for anyone to use which will save you money getting it developed and save you time.

Do you want to risk your ranking on the speed of your Web pages?

Particularly when the problem can be easy to fix or not do wrong in the first place!

Get ahead by doing this now, your current prospect s and customers will love you for it and Google will show you love in 2010 by giving you additional “ranking points” that you lazy or clueless competitors will not be getting.

Caffeine

I talked about Google’s Caffeine in a prior blog post.

Google is starting to roll Caffeine out. They’ll be doing it in one of their data centers this year and rolling it out over 2010.

In case you didn’t know, Google has thousands of servers, spread out in numerous data centers.

When you do a search it goes to one of those data centers, they try to optimize it to be th one that will give you the fastest results (which may be the one physically closest to you or the one that currently has the most available bandwidth and servers).

So you might start seeing Caffeine results instead of the normal Google results and you’ll see it more and more over time although many people may not notice a difference (your ranking may change though)

Read the above blog post to get a better understanding of how you can take advantage of the changes Caffeine will bring.

Conclusion

As you can see, in 2010, Google will continue to evolve.

Speed of page loading and great content will become even more important to search results positioning.

Different and more types of information will be searching and show up in results.

Google will be smarter about the content so content meant to trick them will be penalized.

Finally, Caffeine will be rolled out; this will be a big “slap” to some but a big boost to those who take advantage of it.

While these are how Google is changing, remember that other search engines change in similar ways to better compete so they will impact you whichever search engines you focus on.

Also, don’t say you use AdWords so it doesn’t matter.

Google always rolls out their changes to everything they have, as applicable, so if your AdWords destination pages are slow expect even more penalty, if the ads is tricky and confusing Google will understand it better and punish you, if… I think you get the point

Are you ready for these changes?

Are you going to act or react?

Take advantage of what Google offers and the dollars they can bring to your bottom line!

Please leave me a comment below with your thoughts and opinions.

Talk soon,

David

The Shameless (Ethical) Marketer
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